The Era of the Social Media Snob

What is a social media snob? Well I have a feeling you already know, but here is an example.

This is the person that has spent the last 3-7 years making “lots” of money using social media marketing or blogging and teaching others how to do it. And while they are selling you marketing products off their blogs or websites, they tell you that you must engage with your customers in order to make money. They instruct us to make money by doing what they did, which is to listen to your customers, know them, give them value, understand their needs, blah, blah, blah…..

Then what you see with this new type of snob is that once they have made the money, or sold the book, or gotten that high profile job with multi-mil corporation, they appear to be done with us (us – being the customers that got them there.)

This became prevalent to me during the roll out of Google+ with the numerous posts about the “Pluserati” and “Google Plus recommended users.” As I happily went about adding people that I thought would add value to my social networking experience, I noticed that I was only going to be allowed a status of social media groupie to these established snobs.

Since it is obvious then that we were not going to be social media buddies, then at the very least I would hope that by following you I would gain some value from your status updates, but this is not what is happening. Instead we get to see pictures of what they ate, their favorite art, who they are hanging out with (usually more social media snobs), their deep thoughts and musings, and gallingly, more pitches for their products. The best example of this so far is one that gushed on their profile about this new sharing experience on Google+ and how excited they were to participate in this growing community. Know how many people this person is following? 3!

Really? It appears that now that they have a captive audience to “share” their information, which diminishes in value by the post, they do not appear to be very interested in what I have to share. Yes, I realize that the new social royalty cannot pander to their entire kingdom, but including a few thousand of their “customers” to be able to do exactly what they preach would probably add a bit of credibility to their profession. These people are not celebrities who gained their money and fame in ticket sales and TV appearances. “Those” celebrities never promised us anything other than a good performance, so if we choose to follow them without their attention, that’s on us. But to have the very people that evangelized a social media society where you “connect” with your base for growth and money making snub us?

Now I’m not going to call any one specific person out on the carpet here, but let me give you a few examples of the imbalances of the social media pundits that have elevated themselves to snobbery. Remember, these are all people that have made their money off of the social media machine by either selling products directly off their blogs or by promoting the strategies on their websites. I will show you the following to follower ratio. These ratios are taken from both Google+ and Twitter. You tell me if you think any of these people are listening to their audience anymore.